Sound
Sounds in games are typicall recorded by foley artists to give a professional, crisp and quality result in the finished product.
What Is a Foley Artist?
A Foley Artist is a sound artist who creates their own sounds by using a variety of different resources and materials.
What do they do?
They make anything from footsteps to a car crashing through a wall. To achieve the sound of walking they will use the type of surface the game or film is using and make loud footstep sounds on it which can be synced up with the movie or game to make it seem real.
Pros of using Foley Artists as sound –
Gets the unique sound that the person wants.
Non copyrighted sounds, less risk.
Higher Quality –> Well made.
Gives the person greater control over how the sound comes out (They can choose exactly what they want it to sound like)
No external interruption (Cars, birds, ambient sounds etc)
Cons of using Foley Artists as sound –
More expensive than open source sounds, got to rent the equipment and pay the artists.
Takes longer to get the right sound, a variety of materials and resources are used for more complicated sounds.
How does creating sound effects for games differ from creating sound effects for film?
Creating sounds for games would be easier as they wouldn’t have to sound as realistic as it would in a film, In a film if someone is walking down a street it needs to sound like real pavement to trick the viewer into believing it is real.
Whereas, if a Foley Artist is making sounds for a game they can be a bit more free with their sounds designs.
How can audio be optimised for video games?
A variety of sample rates, bit depths and can be recorded in either mono or stereo, mono sounds are single channel sounds meaning you cant get things such as surround sound whereas with stereo its multiple channel sounds meaning you can get a 360degree sound so it could sound like things are all around you to give better immersion. Stereo sounds work better for videogames to give the player the feeling that they are really there and also as a powerful tool for competitive games where a player can listen for another players footsteps.
How has sound processing on video game platforms evolved over time?
In the early days of videogames, when they used arcade machines, the way to get music was to use digital means, where a specific computer chip would change electrical impulses from computer code into analog sound waves on the fly for output on a speaker, they were not of very good quality but were better than using cassettes as extreme usage would cause them to break meaning they wouldn’t work on arcade machines. It was all mono sounds. An example of this is Pac Mans famous song.
Around the year of 1980 videogames started to use sampled sounds, Rally – X was the first game to start this trend by using a digital to analogue converter (a system that converts a digital signal into an analog signal.) which produced sample tones instead of the original tone generator.
When frequency modulation synthesis was released this allowed the tones to be manipulated to have different sound characteristics, where before the tone generated by the chip was limited to the design of the chip itself. This gave the sound designers a lot more freedom to create unique sounds and give the game its own personality.
The third generation of game consoles used 8-Bit audio (the 8-bit era) came about when japan released the family computer which had up to five channel mono PSG audio.
With the release of this we saw many beloved gaming consoles released such as the master system and the atari 7800.
8-Bit themes were a large step forward for the gaming industry and gave us many theme tunes that are iconic to all gamers today, including the original Mario Bros theme and Space Invaders.
After the 8-Bit era better hardware allowed us to move up the 16-Bit processors and 16-Bit audio, The fourth generation of videogame consoles. Where we saw consoles such as the mega drive and genesis. Which were homes to games such as mortal Kombat and Sonic The Hedgehog. This went to 32-Bit and so on until we got to the 128-Bit sixth generation which had the Playstation 2 gaming console, a staple of every millennials childhood which boasted 48 hardware channels of ADPCM on SPU2 plus software-mixed definable, programmable channels with a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz.
Visual elements in games
Games use visual media to feed information to the player such as a red flashing screen to indicate that they are low on health or text that gives the player an instruction such as not enough ammo or the “Press E to interact”
Visual elements are a good way to give feedback to the player because it blends in with the game and helps improve the flow and dynamic of the game because the player will know what to do at any given time, an example of a visual element in a game is the HUD in call of duty,
We can see here the character is hurt, they have 22 bullets in their gun and they have just killed a player and received 100 points for doing so, the hud looks natural to the game and will help create a more casual feel as information is constantly being fed to the player.
Interactive media in games
Interactive media in games is whenever the player is in charge of the game, whether it be simply moving or during a quick-time event, all of gaming is interactive media.
Interactive media will always a have a response to your actions, if what you do is wrong in a game then the likely outcome will be that your character will die but if you do something right then you will progress further on into the level.
It is a good way to keep the player interested and feed them information whilst playing the game.
Jake Ling's Game Development Progress Blog. 